My reading of this is that, if you just use a single password for access to your account, the only change you will see if that the URL of the login screen changes.

For people who only use email for casual correspondence, these changes are not especially important. However, where email contains potentially confidential communications, it becomes important to keep accounts secure. 2FA, and especially U2F, are useful tools in assisting to ensure this, as are app/device specific passwords.

If you're currently using our "alternate logins" system, you will need to migrate to the new system sometime in the next month. We will be removing all old-style "alternate logins" on 31st August. Also, please note that if your alternate login has a second factor, you will now be asked for this after submitting your username and password, rather than entering it on the initial login page.

U2F and app-specific passwords are great advances in FM login security.

I'm of the opinion that its more secure and and more user-friendly than any other consumer-grade two-factor out there. I've been telling anyone that will listen and we're hoping to do more presentations about U2F in the future.

All Chromium-based browsers should support it (Chromium, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, etc).

There is an extension for Mozilla, but no native support yet. I'm told that there are Mozilla engineers interested in it, but its currently quite difficult to do securely in Mozilla due to the lack of sandboxing. I'm sure they'll get there in time.

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Amazon links for U2F capable keys:

We've tested with U2F devices from Hypersecu, Feitian, Neowave, Happlink and Nitrokey. At 9 euro the Nitrokey U2F is the cheapest one we've found, so it's certainly not expensive to get started.

Of course we'll continue supporting TOTP and other methods for the forseeable future.

For people who only use email for casual correspondence, these changes are not especially important. However, where email contains potentially confidential communications, it becomes important to keep accounts secure. 2FA, and especially U2F, are useful tools in assisting to ensure this, as are app/device specific passwords.

I'd argue that with the continuing use of email as the recovery option for most internet services, and with the prevalence of phishing scams, some sort of 2FA is worthwhile for all users. Unfortunately it is more complicated and requires some extra vigilance that is difficult for many users, so 2FA is unlikely to be something that we ever mandate. We are going to recommend it wherever possible and keep doing whatever we can to drive adoption

There is an extension for Mozilla, but no native support yet. I'm told that there are Mozilla engineers interested in it, but its currently quite difficult to do securely in Mozilla due to the lack of sandboxing. I'm sure they'll get there in time.

My understanding of the issue is that the browser has to connect to the USB system in order to communicate with the U2F device. If this isn't done carefully, then it might be possible for arbitrary Javascript code to talk to any of your USB devices - disks, network devices, etc.

This is easier for Chrome to protect against because it already has its sandboxing model where as a last line of defence, Javascript can't do anything outside of its running context (usually the current tab).

Mozilla doesn't have this sandboxing model, mostly for legacy reasons, so the USB supports needs to be implemented very carefully. It can't afford to be wrong as there isn't that last line of defence.

Back to your original question about the extension. I don't know anything about it really, and I'm not a Mozilla user, so I can't really say anything about its security characteristics. If its implemented the way that seems obvuous to me (a secondary task using libu2f-host to communicate with the U2F device) then it's probably not too bad and I would probably use it.

Ultimately though you don't really have much guarantee about anything unless you're willing to go to a lot of effort. Chrome could be broken for all I know. I trust my browser because the alternative is more effort than its worth. You know your own security needs, so you'll need to make the best choice for yourself.